The Greenland ice cap is losing 30 million tonnes of ice per hour, one-fifth more than previously thought. CC-licensed photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. World’s biggest G+T? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same • The Guardian
Kyle Chayka:
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the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.
If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.
In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. “AirSpace” was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere.
My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner’s personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me – who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram – toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map.
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Greenland losing 30m tonnes of ice an hour, study reveals • The Guardian
Damian Carrington:
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The Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, a study has revealed, which is 20% more than was previously thought.
Some scientists are concerned that this additional source of freshwater pouring into the north Atlantic might mean a collapse of the ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is closer to being triggered, with severe consequences for humanity.
Major ice loss from Greenland as a result of global heating has been recorded for decades. The techniques employed to date, such as measuring the height of the ice sheet or its weight via gravity data, are good at determining the losses that end up in the ocean and drive up sea level.
However, they cannot account for the retreat of glaciers that already lie mostly below sea level in the narrow fjords around the island. In the study, satellite photos were analysed by scientists to determine the end position of Greenland’s many glaciers every month from 1985 to 2022. This showed large and widespread shortening and in total amounted to a trillion tonnes of lost ice.
“The changes around Greenland are tremendous and they’re happening everywhere – almost every glacier has retreated over the past few decades,” said Dr Chad Greene, at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US, who led the research. “It makes sense that if you dump freshwater on to the north Atlantic Ocean, then you certainly get a weakening of the Amoc, though I don’t have an intuition for how much weakening.”
The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years and in 2021 researchers spotted warning signs of a tipping point.
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Tetris: how a US teenager achieved the ‘impossible’ and what his feat tells us about human capabilities • BBC Future
Tom Stafford:
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In the dying days of 2023, US teenager Willis Gibson – online handle “Blue Scuti” – “beat” the Nintendo Entertainment System version of the video game Tetris, which was first released in 1989.
The original Tetris designers thought it couldn’t be done – the game is designed to play endlessly. The pieces fall faster and faster until a player is overwhelmed. To beat the game, a player has to achieve scores so high that the game’s memory banks overload and it crashes. Victory is achieved because the computer simply cannot continue.
As a professor of cognitive science, I’m interested in how people acquire expertise, particularly in video games, so when Gibson performed his dizzying feat, it immediately caught my eye. How this 13-year-old did it tells us a lot about how the limits of human performance are changing in the digital age.
Previously, the NES version of Tetris had only been beaten by AI. A specially designed program was able to perceive, near-instantly, the state of the Tetris game and select actions as fast as the console could register them. It played tirelessly, never making an error – something that seemed far beyond the constraints of mere human performance.
At the time, 2021, the AI-Tetris player was able to show humans previously uncharted levels of the game. Like physics at the limits of a black hole, the reality of Tetris begins to bend at the higher levels. The speed suddenly doubles at level 29, a level few humans reach and fewer survive for long. When the score counter breaks 1 million, the digits begin to be replaced by letters, and then finally glyphs from the Tetris graphic set. Eventually, the colours of the blocks warp and change, some levels are all violent pink, others have blocks so dark you can hardly see them – especially at the speed you need to act to survive.
This is the context for the game Gibson streamed on 21 December 2023, in which he played the game at increasingly frenetic speeds for 40 minutes. In the process, he set new world records for high score, levels played and lines cleared.
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Also: the psychology of Tetris: “it takes advantage of the mind’s basic pleasure in tidying up.” Why then does it work on teenagers?
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Google is losing its Fitbit leaders and laying off hundreds of AR employees • The Verge
Sean Hollister:
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Google’s hardware division just took a body blow. The company has confirmed it’s laying off hundreds of hardware workers, especially in its augmented reality division — and 9to5Google is reporting that Fitbit co-founders James Park, Eric Friedman, and other Fitbit leaders are leaving the company entirely.
Here’s Google’s statement to 9to5Google:
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A few hundred roles are being eliminated in DSPA with the majority of impacts on the 1P AR Hardware team. While we are making changes to our 1P AR hardware team, Google continues to be deeply committed to other AR initiatives, such as AR experiences in our products, and product partnerships.
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Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini confirmed the numbers to The Verge.
This is likely the end of Fitbit as we know it, just over four years after Google bought the company for $2.1bn in November 2019.
Not that this entirely comes as a surprise. My colleague Victoria Song spent a good portion of last year writing about how Google was not only dropping the ball with Fitbit, but hanging users out to dry by axing beloved features, presiding over multi-day outages, and generally pushing people towards a Pixel Watch instead of a Fitbit band. The company even quietly pulled Fitbit products from over a dozen countries.
I’m not going to say we told you so, particularly since the Pixel Watch is shaping up to be a decent device, but… we definitely discussed the possibility that Google-Fitbit could be quite a mess.
For its part, Google’s spokesperson says that Fitbit will live on: “We remain very committed to serving our Fitbit users well, innovating in the health space with personal AI, and building on the momentum with Pixel Watch, the redesigned Fitbit app, Fitbit Premium service, and the Fitbit tracker line. This work will continue to be a key part of our new org model,” Mencini tells The Verge.
…When Google says its “1P AR hardware team” is seeing the majority of impacts, that means it’s chosen to spend fewer dollars on developing its own glasses by itself.
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The incredible shrinking podcast industry • Semafor
Max Tani:
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Apple has quietly tightened its reporting of how many people listen to podcasts, sending shock waves through an embattled audio industry still reeling from the end of the COVID-era production bubble.
The shift, Apple wrote in a blog post, was technical: the dominant podcasting platform [Apple Podcasts] had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.
But while few users noticed the shift, some of the biggest podcasts in the world saw their official listener numbers drop dramatically. Long-running shows that publish frequently were hit particularly hard. A user who listened to a show like The New York Times’ The Daily a few times, subscribed, but stopped listening would continue to count as a download indefinitely. Even better under the old rules: for people who listened to a show, dropped off for a while, but started listening again later, Apple would automatically download every show in between. The arrangement drove big download numbers, a crucial metric for ad sales and a sign of the vast reach of podcasts as a medium.
For instance, The Daily and Dateline both publicly touted reaching over a billion total downloads. But representatives for these shows would not say if those numbers or other impressive daily or weekly download stats are still accurate, though several of the biggest podcasts acknowledged privately to Semafor that they had seen noticeable declines, and were still trying to determine the actual size of their audience following the change.
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Some are seeing downloads reduced by as much as 40%. But the move certainly makes sense: if you haven’t listened to something for two weeks, you’re probably not really into it. Though that’s going to kill a lot of advertising.
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OpenAI quietly removes ban on military use of its AI tools • CNBC
Hayden Field:
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OpenAI has quietly walked back a ban on the military use of ChatGPT and its other artificial intelligence tools.
The shift comes as OpenAI begins to work with the U.S. Department of Defense on AI tools, including open-source cybersecurity tools, Anna Makanju, OpenAI’s VP of global affairs, said Tuesday in a Bloomberg House interview at the World Economic Forum alongside CEO Sam Altman.
Up until at least Wednesday, OpenAI’s policies page specified that the company did not allow the usage of its models for “activity that has high risk of physical harm” such as weapons development or military and warfare. OpenAI has removed the specific reference to the military, although its policy still states that users should not “use our service to harm yourself or others,” including to “develop or use weapons.”
“Because we previously had what was essentially a blanket prohibition on military, many people thought that would prohibit many of these use cases, which people think are very much aligned with what we want to see in the world,” Makanju said.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The news comes after years of controversy about tech companies developing technology for military use, highlighted by the public concerns of tech workers — especially those working on AI.
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Internet cafes introduced Uganda to the internet; now they’re closing • Rest of World
Jon Lubwama:
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In 2014, [then 30-year-old Derrick] Bukenya launched his own internet cafe, BK Internet Cafe, in Mpererwe, a low-income Kampala suburb. At the time, the Uganda Communications Commission estimated that Uganda had about 10 million internet users, representing roughly a third of the country’s population.
“When I launched my cafe, the business was booming,” Bukenya said. He launched four more cafes in the neighborhood and remembers them being packed with young people. “Facebook was the go-to social network. Young people could spend hours just chatting and catching up with friends,” he said. “Then also Google had taken a foothold, so our customers were just searching for anything. YouTube was prohibited because it would consume a lot of data and the internet speeds weren’t great anyway.”
Bukenya said the industry shifted in 2016. Cheap Chinese smartphones suddenly became widely available across Uganda. “All of a sudden, one could get a good smartphone for less than 500,000 shillings ($170),” he said. In their wake, telecom providers launched cheap internet and data bundles.
Over the next three years, internet cafes in Mpererwe closed down. “By the time Covid-19 came around, I was the only internet cafe left standing,” said Bukenya, who has since diversified his revenue. He now makes the most money selling movies, and offering printing, photocopying, and scanning services.
Bukenya admits the internet part of his cafe no longer attracts users. Some days, no one uses the computers at all. “I don’t think it makes sense to have a business that serves very few users,” he said. “Printing, scanning, and photocopying documents sustain us for now … but I am thinking of pivoting to a coworking space to tap into the remote workers.”
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Apple grabs the top spot in the smartphone market in 2023 along with record high market share • IDC
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The last time a company not named Samsung was at the top of the smartphone market was 2010, and for 2023 it is now Apple. A sort of shifting of power at the top of the largest consumer electronics market was driven by an all-time high market share for Apple and a first time at the top.
Overall, the global smartphone market remains challenged, but momentum is moving quickly toward recovery. According to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, global smartphone shipments declined 3.2% year over year to 1.17bn units in 2023.
While this marks the lowest full-year volume in a decade, driven largely by macroeconomic challenges and elevated inventory early in the year, growth in the second half of the year has cemented the expected recovery for 2024. The fourth quarter (4Q23) saw 8.5% year-over-year growth and 326.1m shipments, higher than the forecast of 7.3% growth.
“While we saw some strong growth from low-end Android players like Transsion and Xiaomi in the second half of 2023, stemming from rapid growth in emerging markets, the biggest winner is clearly Apple,” said Nabila Popal, research director with IDC’s Worldwide Tracker team. “Not only is Apple the only player in the Top 3 to show positive growth annually, but also bags the number 1 spot annually for the first time ever. All this despite facing increased regulatory challenges and renewed competition from Huawei in China, its largest market.
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Maybe foldables weren’t the answer? Apple reached the top because it lives at the premium end, and while the market shrank overall the premium end stayed the same. Overall, it barely sold more – IDC puts it at 3% – while Samsung’s figure shrank by 14%. You could guess more of that reduction is at the low end.
Apple revises US App Store rules to let developers link to outside payment methods, but it will still charge a commission • 9to5Mac
Chance Miller:
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Apple has also confirmed that it will charge a commission on purchases made through alternative payment platforms. This commission will be 12% for developers who are a member of the App Store Small Business Program and 27% for other apps.
The commission will apply to “purchases made within seven days after a user taps on an External Purchase Link and continues from the system disclosure sheet to an external website.”
Apple says developers will be required to provide accounting of qualifying out-of-app purchases and remit the appropriate commissions.
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“To help ensure collection of Apple’s commission, developers are required to provide a periodic accounting of qualifying out-of-app purchases, and Apple has a right to audit developers’ accounting to ensure compliance with their commission obligations and to charge interest and offset payments.”
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As both this Court and the Ninth Circuit recognized, collecting a commission in this way will impose additional costs on Apple and the developers.
However, Apple also says that collecting this commission will be “exceedingly difficult and, in many cases, impossible.”
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Darkly hilarious. Apple doing the absolute bare minimum to comply with the letter of the law, while not letting go in the slightest of its grip on the App Store and its monetisation thereof.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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